CLUB POT MED

Livid over the vague voter-enacted state law allowing use of medical
marijuana, a crusading lawyer tries to untangle unintended
consequences. The law has driven the supply system underground, pot
patients are getting busted, and some cops, prosecutors, and judges
just don't get it.

Jon Graves heard noise behind his house one evening last October. The
house backed onto an alley in the University District, and he was
always watchful. He went to the back of the house to investigate. A
woman was banging on his bedroom window from the alley below.

Graves calls her a crackhead and crack dealer. He took a laser
pointer and aimed it at a "No Trespassing" sign. The woman and Graves
exchanged unpleasantries. "Take your crack dealing somewhere else,"
Graves said to her. She'd been a hassle for him before. "They were
always out back of the framing shop doing their thing," Graves says.

At some point, Graves pointed to an unloaded Mossberg 12-gauge
shotgun, hanging on a rack on his bedroom wall. Graves, about 5 feet
8 inches tall, stout, with a broken spine, was a firm believer in
keeping neighborhood crackheads and street people from his
property--and being capable of dealing with them should they break
in. Once they learned what was inside his home, he'd be screwed.

Graves, you see, had a medical marijuana growing operation,
associated with a religious group called Earth Family Ministries, in
the basement of the house on 12th Avenue Northeast. Known as a "group
grow," the garden had about 100 plants--worth maybe $200,000 on the
street when fully grown, although many plants were far from mature.
Graves was part of the subculture providing medical marijuana for
patients in the Seattle area. In his case, Graves says, he and others
grew the pot for at least 10 patients.

The crackhead called Seattle police. And so Graves' house became the
site of the biggest medical marijuana bust in Seattle since medical
marijuana was legalized in Washington in 1998.

If Graves' attorney, Douglas Hiatt, a crusader in a Cubs T-shirt and
jeans, gets his way, a crackhead will help change state law. But back
to the bust.

At 8:26 p.m., police arrived to investigate the alleged assault
because the weapon was displayed. The cops caught the skunky odor of
marijuana coming from the house--probable cause on the breeze.
Graves, who'd been inside smoking against his back pain, came to the
front porch to answer their query. The break in his spine is held
together by interlocking C-clamps, and only a few hours go by when
Graves isn't in acute pain, pain that multiple surgeries have not corrected.

One cop asked about a small tree in the front yard. A marijuana plant?

"It's a Japanese maple," Graves explained. Then he leveled with the
cops: Inside the house was a pot grow for chronically ill patients.
He told them, he says, that he wasn't the sole gardener, that others
helped him grow the pot. Patients were working collectively to grow
medical marijuana for one another--a group grow, as they are called,
but nowhere near as in the open as they are in California.

Graves had run afoul of a gray area in Washington state's medical
marijuana law, approved by voters. The law is silent on how patients
incapable of growing for themselves are to gain access to medical marijuana.

The police entered Graves' home, the ministry, and seized about 100
marijuana plants in various stages of maturity. Seattle police also
seized $1,730 in cash, money Graves said came from patients for the
power bill. The cops clearly thought otherwise. They also took the
shotgun and a Daisy air rifle in the sweep.

Then, police did something that could only happen in a city where
police generally couldn't care less about pot. They permitted Graves
to keep nine plants, as allowed under city of Seattle policy for
medical marijuana patients; 2 pounds of dried marijuana; and several
bongs and other smoking paraphernalia.

Graves says a sergeant on the scene told him that SPD was looking for
a test case, in essence, to clarify the ill-defined medical marijuana law.

Soon after, Hiatt, a former public defender, got involved. He usually
does. If there's a bust involving medical marijuana within state
borders, Hiatt has his finger in the dike in some fashion, no matter
how major or chippy the case, always working to get charges dropped
by convincing cops and prosecutors that, yes, there is a medical
marijuana law and his client abides by it. It's Hiatt's jihad in the drug war.

Is there a medical marijuana patient threatened with eviction from
public housing? Hiatt pounds on the Seattle Housing Authority. A
medical marijuana patient tests positive for pot on an
employer-required piss test? Hiatt can negotiate that job back.

The mess that gets Hiatt out of bed each day exists because the
state's medical marijuana law is so broadly worded that cops keep
busting legitimate patients, that judges state that the law doesn't
exist, and that newly diagnosed cancer patients, for example, are
frequently left with no practical way to grow their own marijuana, as
the law allows. They are a bit too sick, and it takes three to four
months to go from seed to weed. That's a lot of vomiting in the meantime.

As a result, an underground of patient collectives has cropped up,
intent on providing patients, new and old, with ready access to
medicinal cannabis, as some call it.

Hiatt's crusade is to keep patients and growers out of the clutches
of law enforcement and jail. He's a busy man, presently engaged in
keeping Graves from going to the joint and juggling other cases as
well. It's work he does pro bono, the bill covered by a grant.
Recently, a medical marijuana patient he'd gotten out of a legal jam
gave Hiatt a 300-pound hog. Hiatt is a Chicago native and wore a Stan
Mikita helmet playing hockey as a kid. He welcomed the pork.

"I felt like Atticus Finch," he says, laughing his ass off. The
reference is to a classic legal-hero archetype, paid with chickens in
To Kill a Mockingbird.

To listen to Hiatt talk about the realities around medical marijuana
laws-- who gets busted and who goes to jail-- is fascinating. It is
also a bit like opening a fire hydrant on a hot day.

"Does our law allow for co-ops, for group grows? Can you have a
cooperative grow? I'm arguing that our law is big enough to allow
patients to band together to grow together. To the federal
government, it's all illegal. If patients are growing in groups, then
it's a big fucking conspiracy. The U.S. attorney here [John McKay]
hasn't pushed much on medical marijuana, but the DEA [Drug
Enforcement Administration] is crazy on the subject."

In 1998, Washington voters approved a medical marijuana law. It
allows sick people with certain conditions--cancer, AIDS/HIV, Crohn's
disease, chronic pain, and a few other conditions--to legally smoke,
possess, and grow a 60-day supply of pot for their own consumption,
after their doctor "recommends" it. Or they can appoint a caregiver,
a close friend, or a relative to grow the weed for them.

Hiatt has been working to plug the holes in that law for eight years.

After finishing his teen years in Atlanta, he went to George Mason
University in Virginia and, after graduation, did political
consulting in Washington, D.C. Later, he worked on Democratic
election campaigns in Georgia, such as one against Newt Gingrich.

Hiatt, 47, stands about 6 feet tall and has graying hair pulled back
in a short ponytail. His regular noncourt uniform consists of jeans,
black tasseled loafers, and the Cubs T-shirt, untucked.

By the mid-1980s, he was married with two young daughters. He was
also done with political work. In 1988, he packed the family into a
car and drove across the country to attend law school at the
University of Puget Sound. (This law school later moved to Seattle University.)

In the mid-1990s, Hiatt was a public defender in Skagit County,
working on behalf of everyone from misdemeanants to alleged
murderers. He was assigned to handle the case of a nurse who,
stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, had taken it upon herself to seek
relief by growing marijuana outside her home in Rockport. This was
before self-medicating with pot was legal in this state. The nurse,
Beverly Prouty, ran afoul of the law.

It was in the air in liberal circles in those days that marijuana
helped AIDS and cancer patients in ways that conventional medicines
could not, despite a dearth of studies on the matter. And here was
Exhibit A. Hiatt sensed Prouty was getting actual medical value from
the drug that the federal government still insists causes reefer madness.

Hiatt, then, re-examined his own attitude toward pot. He'd smoked
some in college, yeah, but he'd had little more than a joint at
cocktail parties since finishing law school. He had a wife and kids
and a house in Ballard. Prouty eventually pleaded guilty to a
misdemeanor. "That totally changed my life," Hiatt says now. "People
who are sick and dying, being hassled for taking medicine--that's
fucked up, bro."

A year or so later, he took up the case, pro bono, of an AIDS patient
in Seattle who'd been popped for reefer. This is when Hiatt got
religion. In those years, gay people were dying left and right from
AIDS, and it was among those patients that Hiatt did his first work.
Once, an AIDS patient went to the emergency room at Swedish Medical
Center, covered with the skin lesions that AIDS can cause. A young
doctor, upon learning that the man claimed to be a medical marijuana
patient, right there in the ER diagnosed the man as a street drug
user, and he was shuffled off to a waiting area. Hiatt got the call.

"I spent eight hours at Swedish fucking fighting to get that guy
treated," he says. "I've watched doctors fuck with medical marijuana
patients for years, and it is fucking bullshit. These people aren't
dopers. These are sick people. The only crime is how they are treated."

In dribs and drabs, medical marijuana patients are still being busted
in this state, especially in Thurston County and in Eastern
Washington, where some cops, prosecutors, and judges see the medical
marijuana law as nonexistent.

On a recent day, Hiatt held forth on the state of the law. He was
driving his Toyota minivan--an anti-probable-cause model, as he calls
it--on his way to see another patient who was in a dicey spot with Johnny Law.

"What pisses me off is the lack of respect for democracy," he says
between cell phone calls. "Voters wanted sick patients to get relief.
This is not what voters wanted. Look at Judge Baker."

Rebecca Baker is a Superior Court judge in Stevens County. In May,
she accepted a plea deal from a man with chronic pain who, without
the legally required doctor's recommendation, had begun growing and
using pot. He was busted. Prosecutors recommended no jail time, since
he faced an upcoming surgery. Community service in exchange for
pleading guilty to manufacturing marijuana.

The judge gave him 10 days in the county jail anyhow, and a lecture.

"This medical marijuana defense is a very--it's almost a sham for
people," said Baker, in an assessment at odds with state law.

"This is the kind of shit we put up with," says Hiatt. "How does the
lady who's 70 years old get access to medical marijuana? The law
doesn't work. If someone offered my client a deal like that, I'd say,
'Fuck you, motherfucker, this is not necessary.' In other words, you
convict my client, and we'll see you in an appeals court."

In a recent Thurston County case, a medical marijuana patient with
HIV was popped for possessing drugs. The prosecutor wanted the
patient, Jessica Colpitt, to do eight years, owing to a school-zone
enhancement. A jury found her not guilty of a felony. The jury did
find her guilty of a misdemeanor. Colpitt's attorneys asked the judge
to let the woman remain free while her case was appealed. Judges
commonly grant such petitions for nonviolent offenders.

From the bench, the judge, Chris Wickham, said he wanted the woman
to begin serving her sentence right away because she could die while
the case was on appeal, according to lawyers in the case. The Colpitt
case is currently being appealed to the Washington State Court of Appeals.

During another case, Hiatt was speaking with a deputy prosecuting
attorney in the Thurston County prosecutor's office. Hiatt was pissed
that the prosecution was throwing the book at a sick woman. The
conversation became heated.

"Why don't you look at your calendar, find an afternoon when you are
free, and go fuck yourself," Hiatt told the prosecutor. Hiatt was
forcibly removed from the office.

Obviously, the way the law is applied in such cases makes Hiatt boil.

"The law is supposed to be remedial," Hiatt says. "It's supposed to
fix something. It is not supposed to be interpreted by the courts so
as to become a nullity. But that's not what's going on."

Somewhere in the Seattle metropolitan area is a small house on a
street of other small houses. The front porches are squared to the
same line, and the front steps are all close to the street. One of
these modest homes has a basement, and if you are admitted through
three padlocks attached to two sets of doors, you step into a series
of small rooms, and you see where medical marijuana comes from.

The first room is what's known as the "veg room." The concrete walls
are painted latex white and reflect intense overhead lights. This is
the room where marijuana plants are nurtured from seedling to about
18 inches tall. There are approximately 40 such plants in this room.
They are rooted in black plastic planters, all at least two months
from being fully budded marijuana--or medicine, in patient parlance.

Smoking them at this stage would be about as useful as lighting up corn husks.

When they reach a certain age, these plants are transferred to the
"bloom room." They go into larger planters, plastic paint buckets
really, and are fed water and organic fertilizer. The gardener, who
asked to remain anonymous, says he's proud that he and his fellow
gardeners, medical marijuana patients all, are 100 percent organic.

The temperature in the room runs at 80-plus degrees, the result of
three overhead 1,000-watt halide lights driven by small motors on
tracks affixed to the ceiling. The idea is to re-create a partly
cloudy day in an outdoor garden. There are 20 plants, each of which
will yield perhaps 4 ounces of finished product--in all, about a
60-day supply for maybe 10 patients.

The plants look pretty and, aside from their distinctive leaves,
could pass for a tomato plant or any number of vines. There are
hundreds of strains of the Cannabis sativa plant, the result of
decades of hybridization. A few strains of plants are grown in this
room. Through trial and error, as the gardener explains it,
medical-marijuana-patients-cum-growers have hit on strains they
consider best for addressing certain ailments. Black Jack is good for
chronic pain and helps people afflicted with Crohn's disease, or bone
and nerve pain. Other strains are legendary for assisting cancer
patients and AIDS/HIV patients to stave off, however momentarily, the
nausea that often accompanies their treatments. Conventional
antinausea drugs fail to address their inability to eat or drink.

There are two subtypes of marijuana: sativa and indica. Both are
represented in this room, but only those of the female gender. Male
plants don't flower. The sativa plants are tall, narrow, and lime
green in color, with leaves that fan out at the top. Indica plants
are shorter, by comparison, dense, and bushy, their vegetation an olive green.

Most of the plants in the room have only begun to puff out small
buds. Perhaps five plants are nearing the end of their life cycle,
which is three months or so. Their buds are the size of a small grape
cluster. Tasty looking.

Two strong fans run constantly, creating a dense, sweet, skunky
breeze. Marijuana plants wave back and forth. Stale, recycled air is
bad for growing plants of any species.

The gardener says that utilities for the grow run about $1,000 a
month, covered by contributions from patients.

An exhaust system removes air from the room and vents it outdoors
after passing the air through a thick filter wrapped around an
aluminum pipe. Many an indoor grow, medicinal or otherwise, has been
taken down by neighbors calling cops after nosing the scent of
growing marijuana issuing from a bloom room.

The filter removes 99 percent of the odor, the gardener says.
Outdoors, near the vent, you'd never suspect anything.

Unlike California, where patients can walk right into a buyers club
and get their RDA of THC, growing and distribution are very much on
the hush-hush in Washington.

Delivery is how distribution is handled, says the gardener.

"Look, if your grandmother gets breast cancer tomorrow, she's not
going to rush out and learn how to grow marijuana and all of a sudden
have a 60-day supply of medical marijuana," says Hiatt. He's sitting
in his donated office, the floor of which is covered with piles of
legal briefs and transcripts. A poster of Che Guevara is on the wall
next to a poster of President Nixon, a bull's-eye across his face.

"She's got to start chemo next week. She's sick, and she needs
medicine right fucking now. Do we want her or her caregiver out on
the street buying pot for her? Would they even know where to go? No."

Hiatt knows this firsthand. In 2001, his mother, Betty, was diagnosed
with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy, along with chemotherapy.

"She couldn't eat and barely sipped water," says Hiatt. "She was
throwing up $200 nausea pills and was down to like 80 pounds." His
mother had never smoked pot before, but after giving it a go she
found it to be the only solution for her nausea. She put on weight
and went into remission.

"You just don't know how sticky your hands get until you've rolled 20
joints for your mother," he says.

But the cancer returned. Last year, Betty Hiatt was profiled by the
Los Angeles Times. Soon after, she died.

The next month, Hiatt gave a passionate speech at Seattle Hempfest,
denouncing the federal government for denying that marijuana has
medicinal properties and for putting patients in jail, as the feds
have done in California. Federal laws and state laws conflict
dramatically on the use and possession of marijuana. What he didn't
mention was how internally conflicted the Washington law is.

There are between 10,000 and 20,000 medical marijuana patients in
Washington, depending on who does the estimating. Hiatt's estimate
runs to 20,000, at least 5,000 of them in King County.

The law isn't specific about what constitutes a 60-day supply of
marijuana. Is it a few joints? Or a pound of B.C. Bud? How many
plants does that work out to?

That depends on how patients describe the situation. Depends on how
sick they are. Depends on whether they smoke marijuana or cook with
it (cooking requires more).

"The idea is to stay saturated," says Jon Graves, whose grow was
busted in the University District. He says he smokes or cooks with
about one-eighth of an ounce each day, give or take. He prefers
joints (many patients who smoke do), but some opt for a bong or
vaporizer. Graves also cooks with marijuana and makes butter with
some of the ordinarily useless "fan leaves" of the plant.

Graves injured his back at a rubber factory in Elkhorn, Wis., in
1992. Following surgery, he was on as many as four large Vicodins a
day with some Percocet on the side--powerful opiate painkillers.
Soon, he became hooked and had to take them every day, even when his
back wasn't hurting so much. He switched to medical marijuana because
he couldn't tolerate being a zombie on opiates. How does he compare the two?

"Look, I'm still walking," he says. This is on a good day--he is
standing there wearing a B.B. King T-shirt and jean shorts. A week
later, the Army veteran could hardly move from his chair. Hiatt went
to the kitchen and washed Graves' dishes.

Around the state, neighbors tattle on neighbors smoking pot. Still.

At times, the police rush in and seize all the pot and cash in the
house. Patients have little defense at times like these: The
authorized "recommendation" form (a quasi-prescription) that many
carry means little to many cops.

Last week, prosecutors in Lewis County filed charges for growing pot
and possessing paraphernalia against the mother of a Chehalis teen, a
medical marijuana patient with a doctor's recommendation--in this
case, from a University of Washington clinical professor. Her son has
severe brain trauma and physical pain from an accident and spends his
days in a wheelchair. His mother is his appointed caregiver, and she
had a few plants in a backyard shed. Sheriff's deputies raided the small grow.

"You see?" says Hiatt, who plans to take on the prosecutors and the
cops in Lewis County. "The law doesn't work. It's the kind of shit
that just torques me."

Unlike Oregon and California, Washington has no recognized
identification system so that patients can prove to law enforcers
that they are on the up-and-up. When Washington patients show you
their doctor's recommendations, the documents often are creased and
worn--a condition guaranteed to raise eyebrows.

That's something state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D--Queen Anne, has
tried to address through legislation for as long as there has been a
medical marijuana law in the state. She says she plans to do so again
come January.

What Hiatt and others would like to see is for the Legislature to
make group grows, or patient cooperatives, legal under the law. That
would push Washington's medical marijuana system much closer to the
California standard.

In the Golden State, medical marijuana patients with $55 can score an
eighth of an ounce from a dispensary and walk out with a prescription
bottle filled with pot. Graves showed off one of those bottles from
the Gold Star Pharmacy, which had once contained a strain called
"Romulan" and had a bar code on the side.

Such openly available weed has spurred federal law enforcement to go
after dispensaries in California the way they went after moonshine
operations in the 1920s. In San Diego, federal and local authorities
recently shut down several dispensaries.

"Marijuana is not medicine," says Special Agent Steve Robertson, a
DEA spokesperson in Washington, D.C. "Drugs are bad. Don't do drugs."

Counters Greg Carter, a clinical professor of rehabilitative medicine
at the University of Washington School of Medicine: "The DEA, the
FDA, and the drug czar--they pretty much pull stuff out of their ass
and present it like it's fact, and proven fact at that, and that's
not going to fly anymore." The Chehalis teen is his patient. "The
evidence is there and the science is there" to establish that medical
marijuana is effective medicine.

"I think we know a lot more about the science behind how the
substances in marijuana work," says Eric Larson, director of Group
Health Cooperative's Center for Health Studies. Larson was a
co-author of the 1999 Institute of Medicine study on medical
marijuana, which found that the drug had some medicinal value for
some patients.

Hiatt says that the worst case in the Graves case is that it ends up
in the hands of the feds. But in Washington state, the feds have a
significantly more relaxed attitude than their D.C. brethren. Jeff
Sullivan, chief of the criminal division of the Western Washington
U.S. attorney's office, says that not one federal case has been
brought against a medical marijuana operation since the law's
passage. "With limited resources, we are looking at large-scale
trafficking and not medical marijuana," Sullivan says.

Hiatt and Graves' problems could, instead, be more home-grown, and
that's eating Hiatt up. His client's destiny is in the hands of
Seattle police and the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office.

The Graves case currently sits on the desk of Erin Becker. She's
chair of the drug unit at King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm
Maleng's office. It was forwarded to prosecutors almost 10 months ago.

"I think SPD and other agencies recognize that this is a law the
people have chosen, and we want to be careful and look at each case
on an individual basis," says Becker. She says she is close to
reaching a decision on whether to bring charges against Graves. If
charges are brought, it will be the first against a group grow in
King County, Becker says.

"It's very clear" that state law doesn't allow for group grows such
as the one Graves' Earth Family Ministries had in the University
District, she says. "You can't grow for 10 patients."

But she says she has to balance that against whether there were
obvious signs of a commercial operation on 12th Avenue Northeast.
Like neighbors seeing visitors at all hours. Like detailed financial
bookkeeping. Like 1-inch by 1-inch dime baggies in the living room, say.

"The amount of marijuana enforcement we are doing is very low," says
Capt. Steve Brown, head of SPD's narcotics unit. He points to the
local 2003 Initiative 75, passed by voters, which makes marijuana
SPD's lowest enforcement priority, as well as to the general
depolicing of pot in the city over the last decade.

"We are staying pretty busy with street-level dealing activity," says
Brown--mostly crack, meth, and heroin. "If we've got a legitimate
patient, we are not going to spend our time on that."

Both Becker and Brown agree that state law is vague on the question
of group grows and ought to be clarified. "That would help hugely,"
says Becker.

Even the state attorney general's office agrees that the law is
flawed, especially on the question of group grows.

"I can't give you a 'yes it's legal, no they are illegal' kind of
answer," says Scott Marlow, an assistant attorney general in the
criminal justice division. "The law's too vague and can be applied a
few different ways." He favors some kind of legislative fix.

"Everyone just wants something we can use," he says.

Meanwhile, Hiatt is back in the minivan, shooting north on Highway 99
to see another patient in a pickle. But there's more news on the cell
phone, about an employee at the Evergreen State College, shitcanned
after revealing his status as a medical marijuana patient. He was,
according to Hiatt, fired for being under the influence.

"Messy and ugly and a disaster?" Hiatt says to the attorney on the
other end of the line. "Of course, it's my kind of case. It's the
kind of thing I get all the time."

Hiatt's taxable income in 2005 was $26,700 in grant money, less
income than when he was a public defender. The grant comes from the
Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C.--based reform group
principally funded by Progressive Insurance founder Peter Lewis.
Hiatt sometimes supplements that with standard criminal-defense work.
He's clearly made some money--he owns six guitars, including two
Giffins, custom-built six-strings, and rents a home with his
girlfriend in Green Lake.

But eight years after medical marijuana became legal in Washington,
weed is still a touchy issue in medical circles. Officials at the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center wouldn't make doctors
available for an interview. And it took a week of badgering before
the University of Washington Medical Center and the UW-run Harborview
Medical Center would discuss policies on medical marijuana.

Scott Barnhart, medical director of Harborview, says that medical
marijuana hardly ever comes up as an issue on Pill Hill and that it's
rarely recommended by physicians.

"You're kidding?" says Hiatt. "Has he ever seen the Madison Clinic?"
That's a Harborview-run AIDS clinic. "There are tons of patients
there, and most of them use marijuana."

By his own estimate, Hiatt reckons he's worked as many as 100 medical
marijuana cases in the past three years, often negotiating with
prosecutors to get charges dropped against chronically ill patients.

"I don't know how many people I've represented who are now dead," he
says, referring to many AIDS patients. "You sure don't choose work
like this. It chooses you. Things are screwed up. It's Chinatown."

Extra Info

Seattle Hempfest The 15th annual cannabis-policy-reform event is
Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 19--20, at Myrtle Edwards Park. Free.
www.hempfest.org.